Watch The Great Dictator (1940) Free Online

Release Date: 1940

Cast: Paul Weigel, Jack Oakie, Billy Gilbert, Bernard Gorcey, Emma Dunn, Grace Hayle, Paulette Goddard, Carter DeHaven, Maurice Moscovitch, Charlie Chaplin, Henry Daniell, Reginald Gardiner

Categories: Movies, Anti-war, Black-and-white, Comedy, Political satire, Satire, War film, Political cinema, Anti-war film

The Great Dictator is a comedy film by Charlie Chaplin released in October 1940. Like most Chaplin films, he wrote, produced, and directed, in addition to starring as the lead. Having been the only Hollywood film maker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, this was Chaplin's first true talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film. At the time of its first release, the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. Chaplin's film advanced a stirring, controversial condemnation of Hitler, fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis,... MORE

The Great Dictator is a comedy film by Charlie Chaplin released in October 1940. Like most Chaplin films, he wrote, produced, and directed, in addition to starring as the lead. Having been the only Hollywood film maker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, this was Chaplin's first true talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film. At the time of its first release, the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. Chaplin's film advanced a stirring, controversial condemnation of Hitler, fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis, whom he excoriates in the film as "machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts". Chaplin's film followed only a few months after Hollywood's first parody of Hitler, the short subject You Nazty Spy by the Three Stooges, although Chaplin had been planning it for years before. Hitler had been previously allegorically pilloried in the German film by Fritz Lang, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. During a battle in the last months of World War I, the protagonist, an unnamed Jewish private and a barber by profession (Charlie Chaplin), is fighting for the Central Powers in the army of the fictional LESS